You watch your mouth, boy. Anybody cusses in my office I kind of take it they’re cussing me, and nobody cusses me.
Tyler went out without speaking and left the door ajar. The deputy’s voice said, Wouldn’t mind takin little sister a round myself.
He went on in a kind of cold detached rage up the stairs and into the failing winter light. Dusk was falling and a purple mist seemed to be seeping up out of the earth itself andobscuring the town. Buildings looked blueblack and dimensionless. He stood for a moment looking back down the stairs, then he shoved his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders and went on.
Two stone lions stood sentinel at the gate of the house, but they were chipped and weathered and their ancient eyes were blind. They might have guarded some city long sacked and forgotten: the house they actually watched was subtly going to seed, and the gate itself canted on one twisted hinge.
Tyler went up the cracked concrete sidewalk. A plaster mother duck and six plaster ducklings wended their way singlefile through the sere winter weeds, but like the lions they were weathered and blind and seemed to have lost their way.
He went up the steps to the gloom of the porch. Somewhere behind the curtain windows a light glowed and he could hear soft jazz playing within the house. He rapped on the storm door then opened it and knocked on the peeling white door. He waited awhile and knocked again. After a time he could hear soft footfalls and a porchlight came on over his head. The door opened.
Kenneth?
Hello, Mr. Phelan.
A pair of limpid eyes behind the thick lenses of reading glasses. A thin scholarlylooking man in a white shirt and a blue necktie. Phelan’s cheeks were slick and freshly shaven, and he smelled of Lilac Vegetal. His hand clutched a thin leatherbound volume a forefinger marked his place in.
I thought you were in Knoxville, Kenneth. Well. No. Not yet.
If you wanted to talk to me about it, this is not really a good time for me. Could you come back tomorrow, perhaps in the afternoon?
I did want to talk to you, but not about that. I need some advice about something. Could I come in for a few minutes?
Well. Sure, I guess so. Come on in, Kenneth. He ushered Tyler into a neardark room and made no move to turn on the lights. The room was warm. A gas furnace burned with a soft hissing sound and a thin blue flame. A door opened off this room to what Tyler remembered was the kitchen, and Phelan kept glancing nervously toward it. There was a warm spicy smell of Italian food cooking.
If I’ve come at a bad time-
Oh, no, not a bit of it. Well, to tell you the truth, I was just having a guest over for dinner.
I’ll just be getting on.
Stay a few minutes as long as you’re here. I was just surprised to see you. I’d assumed you’d gone to east Tennessee.
The kitchen door filled with a shadowy form. A heavyset girl in a white dress. A girl Tyler remembered from school. A junior then. A semipretty girl with soft uncertain eyes. At length a name floated into his memory to match the face: Retha Ellison.
Phelan became agitated. There was a curious mixture of humility and defiance in his face. Suddenly it all made a kind of sense to Tyler. Phelan laid a hand on Tyler’s arm.
Kenneth, you remember Retha.
Yes. Hello, Retha.
Hello, Kenneth. How have you been?
Just fine. The grip on his arm had tightened and seemedto be moving him gently toward the door. Tyler felt that for days folks had been taking him by the arm and guiding him places he did not want to go on his own. The anger that Phelan’s kind, familiar face had dissipated returned, seethed just beneath the surface. He jerked his arm hard, and Phelan’s indecisive hand fluttered away.
I guess I’d better get on, Tyler said. He wondered what madness had driven him here to begin with. What advice Phelan could possibly have given him. All these myriad differences between the world he was discovering and the world he’d been taught. There was nothing in Yeats or Eliot or Browning to cover this: had the situation been reversed, Phelan would probably have been coming to him for advice. He wondered how Eliot would have fared against the look in Sutter’s dead eyes.
Well, Kenneth, if you must, then I suppose you must. Tomorrow night, then?
I doubt it.
It wasn’t anything urgent, then?
No. No, it wasn’t anything much. I’ll let you get back to your guest.
Ushered in, ushered out. The hand was at his elbow again as if he were blind or halfwitted and must be forever shown the way.
I’m sorry you have to rush away into the night. But we’ll do it another time. I just had Retha over for some tutoring and we decided to have a bite to eat. You know how things are.
He smiled a quick nervous smile and gave Tyler a conspiratorial wink. Tyler looked away. Beyond the limits of the porchlight the streets lay already dark and slicklooking and empty. Yeah, Tyler said uncertainly, as if the way things were would forever be a mystery to him.
Phelan waved an arm goodbye. His hand still clutched the book, and he looked down at it as if he had forgotten it.
Tyler started down the steps. What are you going to read to her?
Pardon me?
Browning, I’ll bet. You’re going to read her Browning, aren’t you?
For a moment Phelan’s face was empty and dead. You were never a petty person, Kenneth, he said. I wouldn’t start at this late date. You don’t have the flair for it, and it doesn’t become you.
Goodbye, Mr. Phelan. He went on but at the gate he turned and looked as though he might say something further but Phelan had already gone back inside and closed the door. He stood for a moment in the line between light and dark as if he didn’t quite know where to go or what to do.
Well, he thought. We tried the law and we tried the Poet’s Literary Tea Society. I guess I do it my damn self.
Sutter was sitting under the walnut tree with the Coke crate cocked against it when the county car pulled into the drive and stopped. A deputy got out and crossed the yard and squatted before him like some great ungainly bird. He didn’t speak.
Ezell, Sutter said after a time.
Part of Ezell’s jaw had been shot away and surgically reconstructed and the plastic surgery hadn’t taken properlyso that he looked like a partially healed escapee from some mad scientist’s laboratory.
I heard something you’d maybe be interested in, he finally said. There was a curious vibration to his voice, his disfigured jaw lent it the residual hum of some stringed instrument strummed gently and laid aside.
Sutter was paring his nails with a switchblade knife. He did this in silence a time. Then he said, Well, are you going to tell me, or are we playin guessin games? You’d give some kind of a hint might make it easier. Just somethin to let me know what general area it pertains to.
You remember that state prosecutor you got into it with at your trial? Schieweiler, from over at Ackerman’s Field? He’s trying to get you a new trial, and get it moved out of the county. Maybe at Ackerman’s Field.
Hellfire. They can’t try me again on that. They done tried me on it. It done got thowed out.
Well. They claimin jury tamperin. Perjury too, what I hear.
Jury tamperin? I never tampered with a one of them son of a bitches. Never had to. They was already scared shitless.
I just told you what come down. Like I always do. He’s workin with Sheriff Bellwether, over at Ackerman’s Field.
Sutter took out a bag of Country Gentleman and rolled himself a cigarette. He lit it. I appreciate you warnin me, Ezell, he said, his voice slightly furred from the smoke.
Ezell was silent a time. Finally he said, I’m takin a chance just tellin you. It’ll be my ass they ever catch me out here.
Well. I said I appreciated it.
Still the deputy sat. Sutter was tempted to just wait him out, to see would he sit hunkered there while darkness fell and be there still when dawn broke, his Adam’s apple bobbingevery time he swallowed.